E-commerce — Shopify vs custom build, a real cost analysis

The Shopify vs custom question gets argued every week in Baku, usually with the wrong numbers on both sides. Shopify's marketing makes it look free; custom build advocates quote enterprise prices for a corner-shop catalogue. The honest comparison is more nuanced and depends on three variables: catalogue size, monthly revenue, and how much of your business logic lives outside the cart. This is the working analysis.

What each path actually looks like

Shopify is a hosted, opinionated e-commerce platform. You sign up, pick a theme, add products, configure shipping, and you're selling. The platform handles hosting, security, PCI compliance, the checkout flow, and the cart logic. You pay a monthly subscription plus transaction fees plus the cost of apps that fill in functionality the base platform doesn't include.

A custom build, in 2026, almost never means "from scratch." It means a headless commerce engine — Medusa, Commerce Layer, Saleor, or sometimes a custom Strapi/Payload setup — paired with a custom front-end (Next.js or Astro) and a payment gateway. You own the code, you own the hosting, you own the maintenance.

These aren't "the same thing, more or less expensive." They're different products. Pick on fit, not on price.

Startup cost — year zero

Shopify

Subscription: $29–$79/month (Basic to Shopify plan). At current AZN exchange, roughly 50–135 AZN/month.
Theme: free options exist, but a real customised one is $180–$350 one-off, or 1,500–4,500 AZN if you have a studio customise it.
Apps: typically 4–8 apps for a real store. Average $15/month each. Expect $80–$150/month in app costs once configured properly.
Setup labour: 2,500–8,000 AZN depending on catalogue size and customisation.
Domain: 30–80 AZN/year.

Total year-zero cost: roughly 5,000–14,000 AZN for a serious Shopify launch.

Custom build

Discovery and design: 3,000–6,000 AZN.
Front-end build (Next.js/Astro): 6,000–14,000 AZN.
Commerce engine setup (Medusa/Saleor): 4,000–9,000 AZN.
Payment gateway integration (Azericard, Pulpal, Stripe): 1,500–3,000 AZN.
Hosting setup: 500–1,500 AZN.
Domain: 30–80 AZN/year.

Total year-zero cost: roughly 15,000–34,000 AZN for a comparable custom store.

Year zero, Shopify wins on price by a factor of 2–3. This is the comparison that gets made most often, and it's the comparison that misleads most often.

Monthly cost — as you scale

Here's where the math flips. Shopify charges transaction fees on top of subscription:

On the Basic plan ($29/mo), Shopify takes 2.9% + $0.30 per online card transaction, plus 2.0% if you don't use Shopify Payments (which isn't fully available in Azerbaijan anyway).
Apps continue to bill monthly, scaling with usage.
At higher revenue, you'll migrate to Shopify ($79/mo) or Shopify Advanced ($299/mo) to drop transaction fees slightly.

On a custom build, monthly costs look like:

Hosting: 80–250 AZN/month depending on traffic.
Payment gateway fees: 1.5–2.5% per transaction, no fixed platform fee.
Maintenance retainer or ad-hoc developer time: 500–1,500 AZN/month.

At low revenue (under 5,000 AZN/month in sales), Shopify is cheaper. At medium revenue (15,000–50,000 AZN/month), the cost lines cross. Above that, custom starts winning by a widening margin — sometimes 8,000–15,000 AZN/month in fee savings at higher volumes.

The business logic question

Cost isn't the only axis. The other question is: how much of your business is in the cart, and how much is outside it?

Shopify fits well when:

You sell standard products — physical goods with SKUs, prices, stock counts.
Shipping is straightforward — postcode-based zones, weight-based rates.
You don't need custom pricing per customer (B2B tiered pricing).
Your catalogue is under 5,000 SKUs.
You're fine with the checkout flow Shopify provides.

Custom fits when:

You have a configurator — products that get assembled from options with complex pricing rules.
You have a non-trivial B2B side with negotiated prices and credit terms.
You need to integrate with an ERP, a 1C system, a warehouse management system, or a custom CRM.
Your business has subscriptions, leases, or fractional purchases that don't fit "add to cart."
You sell in multiple currencies and languages with editorial content as the main acquisition channel.
You have catalogue over 10,000 SKUs.

The Shopify cost of bad fit

The single most common pattern: a Baku business launches on Shopify, the store works, the business grows, and by year two the team is paying for six or seven apps to bend Shopify into the shape they actually need. Each app is $15–$60/month. Two of them conflict with each other; one occasionally breaks the checkout. The total online store cost — subscription, apps, transaction fees, app maintenance — is approaching what a custom build would have cost in year one.

This isn't Shopify's fault. It's the cost of using a fixed-shape tool on a non-fixed-shape business.

The honest decision

Start on Shopify if:

You're testing whether the business works at all. Don't spend on custom infrastructure for an unproven offer.
You're a small catalogue, standard products, modest expected revenue (under 30,000 AZN/month in year one).
You have a non-technical team that needs to manage products themselves.

Build custom if:

The business has already proven demand.
Monthly revenue is north of 40,000 AZN with growth.
You have business logic that won't compress into Shopify's model.
You're integrating with an ERP or a wholesale operation.

And — overlooked but important — sometimes the right answer is starting on Shopify and migrating to custom in year two or three, once you know what the business actually is. Migrations cost 12,000–28,000 AZN but they happen on a known shape, with real data, which is much easier than guessing the shape at year zero.

At Qaynaq we've built both ways and migrated between them in both directions. If you want a written comparison sized to your actual numbers — current sales, catalogue, projected year-one revenue — write to salam@qaynaq.com.